Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.

Buying and Activation Was Painless

I wasn’t willing to camp out or wait in line more than an hour prior to the store opening. But in spite of having 200-250 people ahead of me (a line long enough that it had to be split into two, with us “overflow” people being in a second line outside the mall), once the store re-opened at 6pm it only took about an hour to get to the front of the line, and about 4 minutes to actually purchase my phone. My overall time commitment was about 2 hours. Apple, and presumably the mall folks as well, did a terrific job of managing the external queue, and the customers inside the store.

Once out of the store, I actually had Real Life Activities planned, so I didn’t even open the box to look at the unit until almost midnight. My activation process, unlike a few I’ve read, was quick and smooth, no hiccups. And although I was transferring my number from another wireless provider (goodbye Verizon!), it transferred with no further intervention from me; within an hour I could make calls, and about a day later I could receive them. All in all, a very satisfying and convenient process — which is kind of amazing given that there are three major businesses involved, including one (Verizon) who has every incentive to make the process hard.

What Other People Are Saying

There are a number of other online reviews and personal experiences; here are a few that are both thoughtful and I (mostly) agreed with:

• Daring Fireball’s iPhone First Impressions
• The Official stevenf iPhone Review
• James Duncan Davidson’s iPhone Lists
• Glenn Fleishman’s First Days with the iPhone

(The NYTimes and WSJ reviews are also good, but their for-pay nature makes them harder to link to…)

Audiobooks on iPhone Notes

A few things I haven’t read elsewhere. First of all, the main reason I got the phone was to keep Aldo on Audiobooks current on listening to audiobooks on an iPod. I’m happy to report that the iPhone is a superb audiobook playback device. It is in most ways a major leap forward, making my 2nd generation iPod nano look primitive. There are also a few serious flaws, which I hope will be corrected. I’ll have more details on both sides of the coin in a post tomorrow Sunday soon.

Second, getting the 8 gigabyte version of the iPhone is a no-brainer. Previously I recommended the 4 gigabyte iPod nano as the best iPod for audiobooks. 4 gigs of memory is plenty of room for audiobooks, podcasts, and a modest collection of music. This is because the iPod nano’s screen is small enough that it’s not very interesting for photos, and nanos cannot play video at all, so you don’t need much, if any, room for these media.

The iPhone’s screen and features, however, are such that you’ll almost certainly want to have a collection of photos, and videos have never looked so good on such a small device. As a result, the percentage of space I allocate to audiobooks has gone from 75% to 50% of the total capacity, making the extra space much more necessary. For only 20% more cost, you get double the capacity. Yeah, it’s an extra $100, but if you’re already spending $500 on a phone, you can spend $600 just as easily. Get the 8 gig model.

Third, you can listen to an audiobook over the speakerphone. The audio fidelity and volume are not good enough for music (IMHO), but are decent for listening to spoken word, at least in a reasonably quiet environment. This is really cool, especially because…

Fourth, while the built-in microphone and click-control of the included iPhone headphones are very, very cool, I had forgotten how much I hate the standard iPod earbuds. Uncomfortable, and they won’t stay in my ears. Just awful. But I don’t want to give up the microphone or one button control; it’s far too useful when listening to audiobooks, where you need to pause playback to talk to someone. Audiobooks are different from music; you can’t just pull out an earbud and miss a few minutes of the track while you talk. But hitting pause on the iPhone itself is a multi-step process, once the screen sleeps and locks. The click-control makes that a non-issue…except it means you have to use the included headphones.

This is a huge opportunity for Shure, Etymotic, and the other makers of high-end headsets (my wife likes her Shure E3c set, and I was about to buy the new Shure SE210, which fit great at Macworld Expo, but they don’t have a mic or controls). I am totally ready to buy a whole new set of nice headphones to work with my iPhone, but only if it has the built-in mic and controls.

Other iPhone Notes

Fifth, while others have complained about AT&T’s “2.5 gen” EDGE network, my experience has been better. Maybe my expectations were lowered by the universally negative comments, but personally I found it amazing that I could be on vacation in a semi-rural town (~2500 official population) this past week, and have a usable version of the Internet in my pocket. Yes, it could be faster; I wouldn’t want to do my daily surfing on it. But to pull out the phone to get a definition of “second cousin, twice removed” while drinking margaritas on the deck, or to read MacInTouch while lying in a hammock, it was a perfectly adequate implementation of a capability that is, or ought to be, mind-blowing.

Finally, 373 contacts on my phone is too many; finding a phone number on the phone is slower and harder than it should be. Not horrible, not hard, just not graceful. (Favorites are only useful if you keep the list very short; I’m trying to keep mine to one screen, no scrolling.) My first attempt to improve this was a Smart Group in Address Book that only included contacts that were useful on an iPhone, that is, those with a phone number, email address, or URL:

This reduced the total number of contacts to 363 — not exactly a huge improvement.

More fine-grained groups on the iPhone do help, but Address Book needs some small-but-significant improvements to make my groups more useful with my iPhone. Specifically, I want to be able to exclude a set of contacts that are not useful on my phone, because they are old or or people I am not ever likely to call (but need to keep for e.g. twice-yearly mass mailings).

To do this, I need a way to create Smart Groups that exclude contacts which are in another group. That is, I have an “Old / Hide” group of contacts, that I manually maintain, of those contacts which I want to hold onto, but which I don’t want to carry around with me. But for that to be useful, I need to be able to create Smart Groups that subtract this group out of it. You can do this with Smart Playlists in iTunes, but there is currently no way to do it with Smart Groups in Address Book.

The Sonos system has been thoroughly written up in a number of articles and reviews, including Dan Frakes in Playlist (probably the most complete explanation of the system), David Pogue in the NYT and Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. But I think the best overview of the system and its advantages over competitors comes from Louis Rossetto writing at Cool Tools. Louis is one of the original founders of Wired Magazine, and his review provides more context than others I’ve read, which is essential in understanding why the $500 Sonos ZonePlayer is so much better than the $100 AirPort Express with AirTunes.

With so many good reviews, I’ll just add a few of my own notes:

• The system provides a wonderful out-of-box experience. Like an Apple product, unpacking is An Experience, with well thought out package design and gorgeous quick-start explanations.
• The Mac OS X software is terrific, it’s a standard application, no installer necessary. (I really appreciate that, and it stands in stark contrast to the Mac software for TiVo, which I decided I didn’t trust enough to install).
• On first run it checks to make sure you have the latest release of the software, and will download the newer version if you don’t. This is also true of the firmware in the Sonos hardware, which will automatically upgrade itself (you just need to confirm it’s OK).
• Running the assistant to set things up, it automatically detected my firewall settings, and gave exact instructions for what to do next, with instructions clear and simple enough they would pass the proverbial grandmother test. This was also true when I installed the Windows version of the software on Rochelle’s (now decomissioned) PC.
• The other steps in the process were similarly easy to just follow along as the software lead me.
• Most importantly, it was able to use my iTunes music library, natively and automatically.

That’s not to say that the Sonos Desktop software isn’t without flaws. It’s not iTunes, either in flexibility or in usability. But if you set up your playlists in iTunes, the Sonos can make use of those, so it gets the job done. You’ll want those playlists for your iPod anyway, right? And of course, it won’t play music purchased from the iTunes Store.

At any rate, for having music playing regularly, throughout the whole house, the Sonos cannot be beat. Highly recommended.

I use a virtual desktops utility today (Desktop Manager), but Spaces looks to be far better implemented, interface-wise. I use backup/archival software today (Retrospect), but the interface is baroque, and frankly Retrospect seems to be resting on its laurels (and patents), making almost no progress since the transition to OS X. (Which is why I’ve switched to SuperDuper for my most critical, daily backups.)

Maybe others have implemented features grossly similar to things coming in Leopard. That doesn’t mean it won’t be the first time those capabilities actually get used by large numbers of people. It doesn’t mean that things like Time Machine won’t be potentially life-changing for a large percentage of Apple’s customers.

(When I say “life-changing” I am thinking of how I stopped using Quicken, forever, after a hard disk failure cost me a year of transactions. I’m religious about backing up now, but it wasn’t always so…)

It doesn’t sound particularly close, but making a statement at all seems to imply that there continues to be commitment and progress, and I consider it a positive sign. I’d love to see betas of the new version, too, but we take what we can get.

One of the top two questions I get asked about audiobooks by visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is, after importing a bunch of audiobook CDs, is there any way to join the many tracks together to get a single track for the audiobook?

For a while I simply shrugged, and said I hadn’t found a good tool. Then I found a good tool, and added it to the FAQ, but didn’t advertise it too heavily because it was only available for Mac users. But with the latest release the tool has gotten so good, I feel the need to share and promote it. (Windows users, I am sorry, but I haven’t found anything for you yet.)

Doug Adams runs a terrific site called Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Now on its fifth revision, his Join Together tool has evolved from a basic AppleScript into a stand-alone application which gives you a terrific interface for combining tracks and adding the right metadata such as title and author, along with options to convert to different formats, and even add chapter marks to the resulting merged track:

It’s truly an outstanding piece of work. If you’re importing audiobooks on a Mac, get it now. And if you use it and like it, be sure to thank Doug with a donation!

The overall quality of the sessions was very high, among the best of any technical conference I’ve attended. A couple of duds, but some really amazing speakers, too, bringing the average way up. But what I thought was particularly interesting was that, of the top five speakers I listened to, one was the creator of Rails (so set him aside), and the other four are current and former Java luminaries.

Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland of Relevance are still doing work for clients in Java, but also in Rails, and were to my mind the best speakers at the event. They speak at a lot of conferences, so if you ever have a chance or choice, choose their sessions. Great energy, great speaking skills, and exceptionally well-designed slides combine for two of the best technical talks I’ve ever seen. As professionals still working in Java, their insights into what makes Rails special were the most clear and well-defended of any at the conference.

Dave Thomas and Mike Clark, by comparison, like to start their talks with “My name is x, and I’ve been Java-free for y months and z days.” Not only did they give great talks during the conference itself, but they also taught the Rails Guidebook the day before RailsConf opened, and are terrific trainers and speakers. They still speak on the Java circuit, not about Java, but rather explaining this new Rails thing to Java developers.

At any rate, there are enough Java luminaries who are leaving Java for Rails that it at least should make any Java developer stop and think about why that might be happening.

Another thing I’ll mention is to repeat something Stuart Halloway said at the end of his talk. RailsConf 2007 will not be like RailsConf 2006, because even though Rails is experiencing strong growth now, it’s going to explode in the second half of this year and first part of next. As steep as the adoption curve is today, it’s going to be more vertical in 6 months.

Which means next year RailsConf will be a lot bigger, and accordingly less tight-knit and informal. This year’s RailsConf sold out the 550 seats in days. Even with a larger venue and 2000 seats, I predict next year sells out in less than two weeks. It’ll feel different. So if you attended this year, spend some time reflecting on the experience. It was special, and may not be repeated.

Last, let me be yet another person who points out how weird it was to be at a non-Mac technical show, and see so many PowerBooks and MacBooks (Accordion Guy covers this nicely).

This could be because Rails strongly imposes the taste of the primary developer of the framework. DHH’s sense of style and design is simple and elegant, and reflects his own personal vision of how things should be done. (I don’t mean to discount the contributions of the Rails Core here, but they are a self-selected group who had to possess similar tastes to join the project started and still guided by DHH’s (strong ;-) opinions.) Who does this remind you of? Is it any wonder that this appeals to Mac people?

Of course, it could simply be a reflection of how much better Ruby and Rails, and the associated software like Apache / lightTPD run on Unix-style operating systems compared to Windows, where they run OK, but not well.

At any rate, let me conclude by admitting that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and my goal is to be doing 100% Rails development work by the end of the year. I doubt that I’ll be giving a talk at next year’s RailsConf, but if I did, I want to be able to start with “My name is Michael Alderete, and I’ve been PHP-free for x months and y days”…

My interest in and comments on the announcement are quite a bit less global in scope.

Rochelle’s current PC is a desktop system I assembled myself. It’s got a 1 GHz Celeron processor, and 512 megs of RAM. It’s sloooooow. But this is Rochelle’s year for new computing hardware, so we’d been planning to replace it, with a top-of-the-line ThinkPad.

I had entertained the idea of getting her a MacBook Pro, because I think that she’d probably come to like Mac OS X (and the iLife applications) quite a bit, but also because it seemed likely that someone would eventually announce a decent way to run Windows on that system.

But while I would love to Switch Rochelle, I know that a fallback plan of “it will probably eventually run Windows” will not save my ass if she decides she wants to stay on Windows. (And Rochelle quickly saw through my real fallback plan of “Well, I guess I could take that brand new MacBook Pro off your hands. It’s a little better than my two year old PowerBook…”)

With Apple delivering today dual-boot capability (and no doubt delivering more sophisticated virtualization capabilities in Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, when it ships), I don’t need a fallback plan. I don’t have to figure out the Lenovo online store and how to order the damn ThinkPad I decided was the safe choice for what to get Rochelle. I tried twice to work my way towards the model I wanted, which is basically the T43 with similar specifications to the MacBook Pro. But I must be stupid, I couldn’t figure out how to get the store to let me select anything like that, even though I could find the model number in PDF-only spec sheets…

I continue to use and love Eudora as my email client. This despite it being a little long in the tooth, and with a visual style straight from 1999. It may look like a Classic application, and it might not have had a major release in a while, but it works, and is highly usable, especially for people like me, with a huge archive of email messages.

On the Windows side, a new version of Eudora was released late last year. From what I’ve read on the Eudora discussion forum, Qualcomm is working on an all-new release of Eudora for Mac OS X, which will bring a great many improvements, including one that I’m eagerly anticipating, use of the OS X Address Book to maintain the email contact list, instead of Eudora’s nicknames list (which is also confusingly called Address Book in Eudora, but it used to be called Nicknames in earlier versions, so that’s what I’ll call it here).

But, Eudora 7 for OS X is apparently behind schedule (it was supposed to start appearing in beta in the fall of 2005), and not having that feature is driving me nuts. Eudora can already read addresses out of Address Book, so all I need to tide me over is a way to easily add a new sender to the Address Book.

I looked for a while to find an existing AppleScript to add a Eudora sender to the OS X Address Book, but as far as I can tell, nothing exists. Indeed, it looks like people stopped writing AppleScripts for Eudora years ago. But by stitching together ideas and techniques from old scripts, scripts for Apple Mail and Address Book, and some new code, I was able to create a script which pretty much duplicates Eudora’s Make Address Book Entry command, except sticking the new entry in the system level Address Book.

Download the Add Sender to Address Book AppleScript

The distribution includes a Readme file with much more detail, but here’s the basics: To install, download and decompress the script distribution archive. Then move the script file to your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Eudora folder. To use it, select a message in your Inbox, or open a message, which is from someone you’d like to add to Address Book. Choose Add Sender to Address Book from your Scripts menu. Edit the sender’s name and address in the dialog, click Add to Address Book, and voila, Address Book should come forward with the new entry displayed. Add further information to your contact there, if you wish.

There are a number of limitations to the script; see the ReadMe file for details. Hopefully this will be useful to someone besides me!

A little over a year ago, a new kid on the OS X text editing block appeared. TextMate was the first text editing application I’ve seen in 10+ years which has tempted me to leave BBEdit, mostly on the strength of a screencast for Ruby on Rails, where TextMate was (in theory) an incidental part of the demo.

A BBEdit user who simply tries TextMate, and looks for features to be similar, or in similar places, will probably be quite disappointed. TextMate feels, at first blush, like it has far fewer features, and is a letdown if you’re looking for BBEdit with a few added features like the snazzy snippets feature from the Rails video. But this is because the two applications are designed with different philosophies, and BBEdit exposes much more of its features in the menus and dialogs.

TextMate, on the other hand, sometimes seems like mostly text editing infrastructure. Much of the functionality — and virtually all of the really sexy stuff — is “hidden” inside the bundles which provide language-specific tools and commands. TextMate provides the infrastructure to allow very sophisticated features to be built into these bundles, many of which are created or enhanced by third-parties.

It is an application which rewards — many, many times over — the explorer who invests time in learning how to use it, the “zen” of TextMate, which is quite different from how you use BBEdit. Once you have invested the required effort in learning where TextMate’s power lies, I think it compares very, very favorably with BBEdit; for some, it stands head and shoulders above.

If you spend a fair amount of your time coding for a living, TextMate is definitely something to check out. But, invest the time to really understand how it’s supposed to be used. The TextMate Manual and Garrett Dimon’s Trick Your TextMate Series are good places to start.

Update: I learned a few new tricks in this capsule review of TextMate at Vitamin, and someone built this nifty customized quick reference card generator for TextMate that could be indispensable.

Another Update: This TextMate Basics Tutorial may be the best introduction to TextMate available today. Truly outstanding, both for learning how to use TextMate, but also for understanding what makes it so powerful.